I’m off the next two weeks finishing a book, and I can already tell you this is a terrible time to be away from the scene. Hillary Clinton’s announcement followed by her dark-windowed SUV journey into deepest darkest America was the most inept, phony, shallow, slickily-slick and meaningless launch of a presidential candidacy I have ever seen. We have come to quite a pass when the Clintons can’t even do the show business of politics well. The whole extravaganza has the look of profound incompetence and disorganization—no one could have been thinking this through—or profound cynicism, or both. It has yielded only one good thing, and that is a memorable line, as Mrs. Clinton glided by reporters: “We do have a plan. We have a plan for my plan.” That is how the Washington Post quoted her, on ideas on campaign finance reform.

Marco Rubio had a pretty great announcement in that it made the political class look at him in a new way, and a better way. I have heard him talk about his father the bartender I suppose half a dozen times, yet hearing it again in his announcement moved me. I don’t know how that happened. John Boehner is the son of a barkeep. It has occurred to me a lot recently that many if not most of the people I see in the highest reaches of American life now come from relatively modest circumstances. Rubio is right that this is our glory, but I’m thinking one of the greatest things about America is a larger point: There’s room for everybody. You can rise if you come from one of the most established, wealthiest families, and you can rise if you came from nothing. I have promised myself I will stop talking about the musical “Hamilton” and so will not note that this is one of the points made in the musical “Hamilton”: America was special in this regard from the beginning, with landed gentry like Jefferson and Washington working side by side with those such as the modestly born Ben Franklin and the lowborn Alexander Hamilton. But now it is more so. Anyway, back to Rubio: “Yesterday’s over” was good, and strict, and was a two shot applying as much to the Clintons as the Bushes.

Two points on the general feel of the 2016 campaign so far.

One is that in the case of Mrs. Clinton we are going to see the press act either like the press of a great nation—hungry, raucous, alive, demanding—or like a hopelessly sickened organism, a big flailing octopus with no strength in its arms, lying like a greasy blob at the bottom of the sea, dying of ideology poisoning.

Republicans know—they see it every day—that Republican candidates get grilled, sometimes impertinently, and pressed, sometimes brusquely. And it isn’t true that they’re only questioned in this way once they announce, Scott Walker has been treated like this also, and he has yet to announce. Republicans see this, and then they see that Mrs. Clinton isn’t grilled, is never forced to submit to anyone’s morning-show impertinence, is never the object of the snotty question or the sharp demand for information. She gets the glide. She waves at the crowds and the press and glides by. No one pushes. No one shouts the rude question or rolls out the carefully scripted set of studio inquiries meant to make the candidate squirm. She is treated like the queen of England, who also isn’t subjected to impertinent questions as she glides into and out of venues. But she is the queen. We are not supposed to have queens.

Second point: We have simply never had a dynamic like the one that seems likely to prevail next year.

On the Republican side there is a good deep bench and there will be a hell of a fight among serious and estimable contenders. A handful of them—Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Rubio, maybe Bobby Jindal—are first-rate debaters, sharp advancers of a thought and a direction. Their debates, their campaigning, their oppo geniuses, their negative ads—it’s all going to be bloody. Will the American people look at them in 2016 and see dynamism and excitement and youth and actual ideas and serious debate? Will it look like that’s where the lightning’s striking and the words have meaning? Will it fortify and revivify the Republican brand? Or will it all look like mayhem and chaos? Will the eventual winner emerge a year from now too bloodied, too damaged to go on and win in November? Will the party itself look bloody and damaged?

On the Democratic side we have Mrs. Clinton, gliding. If she has no serious competition, will the singularity of her situation make her look stable, worthy of reflexive respect, accomplished, serene, the obvious superior choice? Or will Hillary alone on the stage, or the couch, or in the tinted-window SUV, look entitled, presumptuous, old, boring, imperious, yesterday?

Will it all come down to bloody versus boring?

And which would America prefer? Read More »

We are in the midst of announce-o-rama, in which the candidates for president who are not Ted Cruz are lining up to make their announcements. Here’s a piece by Robert Costa and Philip Rucker in the Washington Post on the importance of getting it right.

Announcements are now apparently so important they even have trailers, like movies.

What’s interesting to me is that this is all new, or at least dramatically heightened. Announcements were always important but didn’t use to be such an event.

In the past, the speech itself and the venue were subject to care. They had to be done well and handsomely. The speech, especially, had to be good, making clear exactly how the candidate views the presidency and what he intends to do with it.

But they tended to be relatively modest affairs, not produced within an inch of their life. They weren’t seen as an opportunity for a show. They were more like something you had to do, and do appropriately, on the way to the campaign.

John F. Kennedy announced on Jan. 2, 1960, in the Senate Caucus Room. No balloons, no applause, no crowd, just him and his text. His elegant, stripped-down statement was short, 442 words, and its spareness suggested erudition—he didn’t have to go on and on, he was the author of “Profiles in Courage,” after all, and understood the nature of the position he sought: “The presidency is the most powerful office in the Free World. Through its leadership can come a more vital life for our people. In it are centered the hopes of the globe around us for freedom and a more secure life. For it is in the executive branch that the most crucial decisions of this century must be made.” Kennedy then took a few questions, which one senses were more or less planted in advance. Would he accept the vice presidency? he was immediately and conveniently asked. No, said the young senator, under no circumstances.

Bill Clinton had a crowd of a few hundred people in 1991 when he announced in front of the sun-dappled, columned façade of the Old State House Museum in Little Rock, Ark. It was a standard, pre-stump stump speech. It suggested, without being too on the nose about it, the need for a new and more moderate Democratic Party. Hillary wasn’t on the stage with him. It was just Bill Clinton and, to his right, a sign-language interpreter, who enthusiastically or politely applauded for the applause lines.

George H.W. Bush announced for the presidency on Oct. 12, 1987, in a big, blue-curtained room in Houston. The production was modest to the point of banal, but he stood with a warm tableau of family behind him. The purpose of his speech was to declare he understood more than most what the presidency is, having for seven years witnessed a great one up close. He had to make clear his independence, share his own plans and goals. He also had to quell persistent fears, especially but not only among Republicans, that he would raise taxes. “There are those who say we must balance the budget on the backs of the workers and raise taxes again. But they are wrong. I am not going to raise your taxes—period.” He asked for a “Taxpayers Bill of Rights” to make clear the limits on IRS power. He called for “prosperity with a purpose.”

Barack Obama’s Feb. 10, 2007, announcement in Springfield, Ill., was more important for him than for most candidates because he was relatively unknown. He had to be introduced to the American public in the right way. But even he had a fairly standard rally with a fairly standard (if large—a few thousand came) enthusiastic crowd. It was cold. He wore an overcoat. There was music (Bono), a podium with a seal (BarackObama.com) and two teleprompters. It was well-produced and shot from many angles. Central to Mr. Obama’s message: You may not know me, but I hail from the land of a man a lot of people didn’t know when he started. “And that is why, in the shadow of the Old State Capitol, where Lincoln once called on a divided house to stand together . . .”

Hillary Clinton made the first big change in how modern announcements are done. She announced in a living room on a comfortable floral couch. It was warmly lit, and she was beautifully made up and coiffed. It’s very relatable, and looks almost exactly like the famous “Saturday Night Live” sketch starring Kate McKinnon.

Will Mrs. Clinton announce that way this time? A guess: after last year’s “dead broke” interview with Diane Sawyer, and after the SNL sketch, she’s done with couches for a while. I would think she might choose to surprise with a speech to a highly enthusiastic crowd packed to the rafters in a not-very-big venue. A mixed crowd but a lot of young people up front, and a lot of homemade signs, banners and flags. Maybe she will be introduced to music. What music will it be? (Is Cold Play too big a cliché?) Will there be a podium? Will she walk the stage? Teleprompters? Will she make clear the higher rationale for her run, the things she hopes to do?

An acceptance speech was always important, but now it’s more so. Everything about presidential politics has become more so the past few decades.

I think the one who took it to a real more-so level was Ted Cruz, in that bowl of cheering students, with no podium and no apparent notes, prowling the stage in dramatic lighting, and all of it live on cable and available for editing down into later commercials. That was one dramatic announcement, and it has forced everyone else to lift their game. And so this cycle Mr. Cruz has already made political history, if not especially helpful history to leagues of beleaguered advance men, staffers and media strategists. Read More »

This is fascinating, via the Drudge Report.  Look at the kind of questions being asked.  It’s pretty clear what some political professionals see, or hope to see, as the potential weak points of a Hillary Clinton candidacy.  Who might be behind this polling?  What use is being made of the data gathered?

Every year political mischief seems to become less and less secret, and voters seem to become more and more sophisticated, at least with regard to the black arts of politics, push-polling and media buys and such.  Polling questions wind up going straight to the Internet and then straight to news sites.  On seeing this, a political professional and veteran of George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign said: “The most interesting thing is how sophisticated Iowa voters have become about polling.  Captured all the questions and criticized the methodology, which is very impressive.  They take their job as first in the nation very seriously.” Read More »

On Friday at the winter meeting of the Club for Growth, in Palm Beach, Fla., Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a possible contender for the GOP presidential nomination, was pressed for specifics of his foreign-policy views. Walker referred to policy professionals with whom he’d recently met, and then suggested that what is most important in foreign policy is not experience but leadership. The “most consequential foreign-policy decision” of his lifetime, he said, was President Reagan’s handling of the air traffic controller’s strike. “It sent a message not only across America, it sent a message around the world.” The message: “We wouldn’t be messed with.”

That caused a lot of raised eyebrows. I here attempt to return them to a more relaxed state. In the 1990s, when I was researching and interviewing for my biography of Reagan, “When Character Was King,” I became more deeply aware of the facts and meaning of Reagan and the flight controllers, and I discovered an element of the story that I think had not previously come fully to light:

It was the spring of 1981. Reagan was still a new president, and recovering from John Hinckley’s attempt to assassinate him in late March. Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis met with Reagan at Camp David to give him bad news. The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or Patco, wanted to go on strike. The union’s 17,000 workers manned radar centers and air traffic control towers across the country. These were tough, high-stakes, highly demanding federal jobs. The union’s contact was up, they had been working under increasingly difficult conditions, and they wanted a big pay increase.

Lewis told me Reagan was sympathetic: The increased pressures of the job justified a pay increase, and he offered an 11% jump—this within a context of his budget cutting. But Patco demanded a 100% increase. This would cost taxpayers an estimated $700 million. Reagan rejected it outright. He told Lewis to tell the union that he would not accept an illegal strike, nor would he negotiate a contract while a strike was on. He instructed Lewis to tell the head of the union, Robert Poli, something else: As a former union president he was the best friend they’ve ever had in the White House.

Reagan’s tough line was not completely comfortable for him, personally or politically. He’d had little union support in the 1980 election, but Patco was one of the few that had backed him. Not many union leaders had been friendly to him, but Patco’s had. And he was a union man. he didn’t want to be seen as a Republican union buster.

Still, Reagan believed no president could or should tolerate an illegal strike by federal employees, especially those providing a vital government service. Not only was there a law against such strikes, each member of Patco had signed a sworn affidavit agreeing not to strike.

Talks resumed, fell apart, and by the summer 70% of the air controllers walked out.

They had thought Reagan was bluffing. He wouldn’t fire them, they thought, because it would endanger the economy and inconvenience hundreds of thousands of passengers—and for another reason, which we’ll get to in a moment.

The walkout became a crisis.

Reagan did what he said he would do: He refused to accept the strike and refused to resume negotiations. He called reporters to the Rose Garden and read from a handwritten statement he’d composed the night before. If the strikers did not return to work within 48 hours, they would be fired—and not rehired. The 48 hours was meant as a cooling-off period. In the meantime, Reagan made clear, nonstriking controllers and supervisory personnel would keep the skies open

What Reagan did not speak about was an aspect of the story that had big foreign-policy implications.

Air traffic controllers in effect controlled the skies, and American AWACS planes were patrolling those skies every day. Drew Lewis: “The issue was not only that it was an illegal strike. . . . It was also that a strike had real national-security implications—the AWACS couldn’t have gone up.” It is likely that even though the public and the press didn’t fully know of this aspect of the strike’s effects, the heads of the union did. That’s why they thought Reagan would back down. “This hasn’t come up,” said Lewis, “but the Soviets and others in the world understood the implications of the strike.”

The administration quickly put together a flight control system composed of FAA and Defense Department personnel, and private controllers, to keep commercial traffic—and US military aircraft—in the air.

It was an international story. The French government pressed the administration to make a deal. Britain backed Reagan. Canada’s flight controllers shut down the airport in Gander, Newfoundland, in solidarity with Patco. Lewis, with the president’s backing, told them that if they didn’t reopen within two hours the U.S. would never land there again.… Read More »

Whatever your views on Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud Party, and the upcoming Israeli elections, put them aside for a moment and appreciate this as sheer political art. It is one of the best political ads I have ever seen—funny, warm, surprising and clever. It seems aimed at what I’d think is one of Netanyahu’s prime problems as a political figure, which is his heavy grimness, his air of aggression and constant warning. Here he is playful, jolly, a father figure. In a quick-moving 1:15, the spot takes acutely aimed yet gentle slaps at his opponents; it suggests everyone knows and so it doesn’t have to be explained that Isaac Herzog is weak and confused and Tzipi Livni unreliable and frenetic. The spot has a sort of French feel, with the comic music and the antic husband. Whoever conceived, wrote and directed it knew something most people, at least over here, do not, or at least I didn’t: Netanyahu is a really good actor.

An interesting artistic question, on first viewing, was why they chose not to include children in an ad about babysitting. The answer turns out to be Israeli election law, which does not allow the use of children under 15 in political ads. Netanyahu’s campaign was recently stopped from airing a commercial in which his opponents were portrayed as rowdy schoolchildren. In the babysitter ad, Netanyahu is watching a clip of himself on a screen, and chuckling. The clip apparently comes from the banned ad. Read More »

This is a good day, with the snow starting to come down heavy in storm-braced New York, to look at the only memorable image to come from the State of the Union address. That image came from the response, by Joni Ernst, Iowa’s new U.S. senator.

She spoke, at the top of the speech, of her childhood in Red Oak, the town in southwestern Iowa where she grew up: “As a young girl, I plowed the fields of our family farm. I worked construction with my dad. To save for college, I worked the morning biscuit line at Hardee’s. We were raised to live simply, not to waste. It was a lesson my mother taught me every rainy morning. You see, growing up, I had only one good pair of shoes. So on rainy school days, my mom would slip plastic bread bags over them to keep them dry. But I was never embarrassed. Because the school bus would be filled with rows and rows of young Iowans with bread bags slipped over their feet. Our parents may not have had much, but they worked hard for what they did have.”

Ernst had referred to the bread bags before, most notably on the campaign trail last summer when she was running against a wealthy Democratic trial lawyer. What she was saying was: I live in the real world, I came from modest circumstances like most of you, I’m not fancy. Nothing new in this approach, it’s as old as Pat Nixon and her Republican cloth coat. Also, to a Republican Party increasingly interested in class tropes, Ernst was saying: I’m not some scared secret liberal from the suburbs who’ll throw you over once I get to Washington, I’m a real conservative.

Leftism too has its class tropes, only they come from the opposite angle. Response on the left to Ernst and the bread bags was snobbish, superior and dumb to the point of embarrassing. First, they couldn’t believe it—no one wears bread bags on their shoes in a storm, how absurd, she must be developmentally challenged. Then they denigrated what she said, putting pictures on Twitter of themselves wearing bread bags on their feet, accompanied by comments that had all the whiff of the upper class speaking of the quaint ways of the help. Andy Borowitz, surprisingly, wrote a dumb, leaden spoof in the New Yorker that seemed a companion piece to Politico’s earlier use of a photo of Ernst that gave her crazy eyes.

I liked what Ernst said because it was real. And it reminded me of the old days.

There are a lot of Americans, and most of them seem to be on social media, who do not know some essentials about their country, but this is the way it was in America once, only 40 and 50 years ago:

America had less then. Americans had less.

If you were from a family that was barely or not quite getting by, you really had one pair of shoes. If your family was doing OK you had one pair of shoes for school and also a pair of what were called Sunday shoes—black leather or patent leather shoes. If you were really comfortable you had a pair of shoes for school, Sunday shoes, a pair of play shoes and even boots, which where I spent my childhood (Brooklyn, and Massapequa, Long Island) were called galoshes or rubbers. At a certain point everyone had to have sneakers for gym, but if you didn’t have sneakers you could share a pair with a friend, trading them in the hall before class.

If you had just one pair of shoes, which was the case in my family, you had trouble when it rained or snowed. How to deal with it?

You used the plastic bags that bread came in. Or you used plastic bags that other items came in. Or you used Saran Wrap if you had it, wrapping your shoes and socks in it. Or you let your shoes and socks get all wet, which we also did.

I remember using string, rubber bands or tape to fasten the plastic over my shoes. So does one of my sisters. Another sister remembered wrapping her socks in plastic bags and then putting on her shoes—she’d let the shoes get wet but protect her feet. The other night, at a swank Manhattan restaurant, my friend Vin remembered putting bread bags over his shoes to get them into his boots. This allowed me to tease him as a Rockefeller.

But America then had less in terms of things—shoes, coats, gloves. I can’t say, “And no one was ashamed.” At a certain point it was embarrassing to for whatever reasons not have the right things, or to come across as haphazard or not taken care of. Kids want to fit in. But there were enough kids in difficult circumstances that you weren’t alone.

In Joni Ernst’s case there was no embarrassment: all the other kids on the bus were wearing bread bags on their shoes, too.

I liked imagining that. I liked her reminding me of not so long ago, before America got rich. Read More »

I saw “American Sniper” last night. It is not a great movie but it is a powerful one. It had the power to leave a packed Manhattan movie house silent—really, completely silent—as they stared at the closing credits and tried to absorb the meaning of what they’d seen. They filed out silently, too. It’s not so hard to leave an audience in a good mood or hungry for dinner, but this silence spoke of a real thoughtfulness. It was a mixed crowd, young and old.

In the movie the sniper, Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, exists for one reason: to stop or kill belligerents who are in the act of attempting to take out American soldiers. If they are attempting to aim an armed rocket-propelled grenade, or they are themselves snipers or al Qaeda fighters, they are in his crosshairs. The American sniper does not shoot those who are not immediately aiming to harm someone. He uses discernment. If he doesn’t he’ll be in legal and military trouble. When he trains his weapon on a mother and son he does not want to shoot. When he sees the grenade the mother passes to her son as they advance toward a U.S. convoy, he shoots. When an Iraqi sniper kills one of his friends he sets himself to finding him and taking him out.

Kyle completely believes, and the viewer is persuaded, that his duty is protecting people, saving the lives of his troops. That’s his daily job and he does it with discipline, talent and professionalism. He’s so good at it he comes to be seen as and called a legend. He is celebrated for his kills; he’d rather someone kept a count of his saves. When after his last tour he sees a Navy psychiatrist who asks him about things he wishes he hadn’t done, he says, “Oh, that’s not me. No.”

“What’s not you?” the doctor asks, with the bland yet piercing look psychiatrists get in movies.

“I was just protecting my guys, they were trying to kill . . . our soldiers and I . . . I’m willing to meet my Creator and answer for every shot that I took.” He adds, “The thing that . . . haunts me are all the guys that I couldn’t save.” That is both the story he told himself and the story he thinks is true.

The movie seems to have pinged off something in the American psyche, with its huge box-office opening. (All hail Clint Eastwood, running the tables at age 84.) Some of the reasons would be obvious. It is based on a bestselling book, the essential facts of which are generally known. We are increasingly a nation of veterans. It is an action story, a war story, with Eastwood directing and Bradley Cooper as the star. But it is also a story about love of country, and what some of those who love it most sacrifice to show that love. Kyle, the movie makes clear, joined up to defend America after al Qaeda began making its moves. When he was a boy his father taught him not to be a sheep or a wolf but a sheepdog—a protector of others. The movie is a meditation on this. It is interesting that Americans want such a meditation.

On the Iraq war it takes no stand. While the film glorifies war—all battlefield heroics, by being admirable, glorify war—there is a persistent antiwar presence, and not only because depicting the damage and dislocation done to those visited by war is an antiwar statement. Chris Kyle’s brother, on leaving Iraq after his own tour, makes a statement suggestion the U.S. is in the wrong place. A heartbroken mother at a stateside funeral seems to cry out for peace. Kyle’s close friend shares his doubts. Kyle doesn’t share them but he hears them, and Eastwood lets them echo out. This is a fair-minded movie. It is not anyone’s propaganda.

It is not a great movie because it is formulaic. We see the scenes we’ve always seen. Boot camp is hell, Kyle and his wife meet cute in a bar near the base, etc. It is all done in a solid and serviceable way but often looks like the latest iteration of what’s been done before. It is being compared, favorably, to 2008’s “The Hurt Locker,” but that movie was a higher form of art, full of surprise and edgier, more confounding. It’s one thing to show Bradley Cooper clenching his jaw at a child’s backyard birthday party, but it was more powerful when Jeremy Renner mindlessly pushes a huge shopping cart through a huge food store with a thousand breakfast cereals and that’s his job now, two days out of Iraq, to choose the right cereal.

Here is one unanticipated cost of how we wage modern war. We ask a lot of our troops emotionally in terms of how we schedule their tours. If during World War II we had our soldiers serve nine or 10 months invading Europe, witnessing carnage and taking part in bloody battles . . . and then had them return for two or three months to banal… Read More »

The new issue of Charlie Hebdo is out. In Paris it sold out almost immediately and the print run has been upped to a reported five million. On the cover is a cartoon of Muhammad, a tear on his cheek. Tens of millions of people will see it.

It is almost enough but not quite.

This is the moment, a week after the shootings, on the day of the publication of the first issue of the magazine since the murders, to rob all the Muhammad cartoons of their mystique. Steal away their power. Make them banal, not secret, censored and powerful but common. Flood the zone, let everyone see them. Show that they are only cartoons, caricatures, playthings. Show that the murderers got exactly the opposite of what they wanted. “You kill to stop a cartoon? We flood the streets with cartoons. You can’t take it? We have freedom here. You don’t have to live in the midst of it, you can go to a place that does not put such an emphasis on this kind of freedom.”

If in the West you keep such things as the cartoons in a magic, censored vault you give them mystical power and luster. These stupid drawings should not be imbued with these qualities! The argument is for disseminating them.

Some great media outlets in the United States, in an excess of what I’m sure they see as prudence, which is a virtue, and not cowardice, which is a vice, have refused to show the cartoons or even today’s Charlie Hebdo cover. I am proud that The Wall Street Journal ran one of the cartoons with an editorial the day after the murders. The Fox News website has run some of them also. Here we give you the new Charlie Hebdo cover.

Today is a day, on all social media and in mainstream media, to show the cartoons. All their mystique should be taken away, definitively. And a message delivered: If you murder a group of people for wearing cats on their heads, you know what the murderer’s supporters will soon see? Streets full of people with cats on their heads. Read More »

It was not a missed public relations opportunity. PR is the showbiz of life, and that is not what this is.

Here are the reasons the president of the United States, or at very least the vice president, should have gone yesterday to the Paris march and walked shoulder to shoulder with the leaders of the world:

To show through his presence that the American people fully understand the import of what happened in the Charlie Hebdo murders, which is that Islamist extremists took the lives of free men and women who represented American and Western political freedoms, including freedom of speech;

To show through his presence that America and the West, and whatever nations choose to proclaim adherence to their democratic values, will stand together in rejecting and resisting extremist Islamist intolerance and violence;

To demonstrate the shared understanding that the massacre may amount to a tipping point, whereby those who protect and put forward Western political values will insist upon them in their sphere and ask their Muslim fellow citizens to walk side by side with them in shared public commitment;

To formally acknowledge the deep sympathy we feel that France, our oldest ally, suffered in the Charlie Hebdo murders a psychic shock akin to what America felt and suffered on 9/11/01. The day after our tragedy, the great French newspaper Le Monde ran an unforgettable cover with an editorial of affection and love titled Nous sommes tous Américains: “We are all Americans.” That was an echo of what our American doughboys, who went to France in 1917 to save it, famously said as they landed: “Lafayette, we are here.” Gen. Lafayette had been our first foreign friend and fought alongside Washington when we needed friends, in 1776. Is it sentimental to note this? Great nations run in part on sentiment.

For these reasons and more, Mr. President, Paris was worth a march.

It matters when, through absence and through bland statements, the leaders of America say: “Lafayette, we are not here.” For all the ups and downs of the Franco-American relationship, the French are our friends. You march with your friends. It is civilizational: Sheer numbers and the importance of those marching show the world what unity, strength and shared commitment look like. Even Putin sent a top official.

The absence of the American president shows, too, what America would never in the past have conceded or acknowledged, and it was there in the photos of the order of the march. There in the center of the world leaders was Angela Merkel, leader of the West. I wrote a piece suggesting she had become that last spring. I was disturbed and saddened—actually I was mortified as I watched the entire march on TV in New York—to see that fact played out on every screen in the world.

Mr Obama is wholly out of sync with U.S. thinking and sentiment.

Well, we sent the U.S. ambassador to France, Jane Hartley, down the street from the embassy to the march, say the administration’s defenders. An Obama bundler, Hartley is widely acquainted with New York’s journalists, who looked for her in the pictures of the crowd. I scanned dozens of pictures and could not find her. The French know a snub when they see one, and the French know how to snub back. I’m sure the organizers put her somewhere among the millions and perhaps through the obscurity of the position showed what they thought of the governmental status and standing of the person America “sent.” Memo to this, past, and future White Houses: just because you send fundraisers to represent our country in high diplomatic posts does not mean those countries will pretend they were sent Chip Bohlen. The French, of all peoples, won’t.

Were security concerns the reason for the president’s absence? Life is a security concern, you must do what’s right. Would massive U.S. security have inconvenienced others? Then make the security around the president less massive, less an imposition. There is no law that says it must be as Caesarian, and alienating, as it is. The president was too busy? He had an empty schedule. So did the vice president. The march was, at bottom, a preening and only symbolic show? When has this White House ever shown an aversion to preening and symbolic shows?

This was not caring enough.

Politico yesterday noted the president’s reaction from day one of the Charlie Hebdo story has been “muted.” He sat in an armchair in his office and pronounced the shootings “cowardly.” He also said something that struck me at the time, that the murders violated “a universal belief in the freedom of expression.” But there is no universal belief of free expression. Where it exists it has to be defended, in unity and with guts. That is the point.

Before I put up this post I searched the phrase “Lafayette, we are not here” to see if anyone had said it yet. It is already appearing on blogs and comment threads. Good. And it would be good to send our friends in France, again through social media, the sentence, “Lafayette we are here, still, and with you, even if our leaders were not. The American people.” Read More »

Now and then a writer hits a nerve. In the case of my column on the threatened closing of my neighborhood church, St. Thomas More, by the Archdiocese of New York, I hit some inflamed and throbbing ones.

Here is the column protesting church closings in the archdiocese, questioning the reasons behind them, and offering suggestions for alternative ways for the archdiocese to raise money.

Here is a reply from Bishop John O’Hara of the New York Archdiocese, printed as a letter to the editor in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal.

Bishop O’Hara also wrote an op-ed-style response in Sunday’s New York Post. It is not available online, but I will quote from it.

To clear away small things:

Bishop O’Hara says I imply the decision to close St. Thomas More has been made. I said it is “threatened.” It is. I asked Cardinal Timothy Dolan, New York’s archbishop, to save it. He can.

The bishop says I committed “a deliberate injustice” to the cardinal by implying the cost of the ongoing $180 million refurbishment of St. Patrick’s Cathedral has added to the archdiocese’s financial pressures. But it has added to those pressures: It is not paid for. How is it an injustice to point that out? The bishop says the cardinal “has spent countless hours” fundraising. I am certain this is true, and certain everyone feels sympathy for his efforts to turn pledges and promises into checks.

Bishop O’Hara suggests there are too many churches in our general neighborhood. I promise the bishop, Upper East Siders are precisely the kind of people who need a lot of churches and a whole lot of sacraments. But in terms of the larger church, three or four functioning parishes in a small area is our glory, not our disability. And if the archdiocese looked closer, they would see that each church has different jobs and offers different programs. St. Elizabeth of Hungary, a very great church also threatened with closing, offers masses and spiritual care for the deaf. St. Ignatius Loyola runs admired schools and offers a majestic setting for those who like majesty. All these churches are separate and compleimentary.

In an unfortunate and, I’m sorry to say, cheap twisting of words, the bishop suggests I hold a bias toward those he calls the “rich.” Readers can judge for themselves. Here I take the opportunity to clarify what I mean by excellence in a parish church. St. Thomas More is “excellent” because it is alive, spreads the word of Christ to young and old of all condition and circumstance, is a steward and local citizen, and manages not only to pay its bills but contribute to the archdiocese. It is a believing and vital part of the body of Christ, and its excellence should not be punished but encouraged.

It appears, however, to be in a position similar to the charter schools in the de Blasio era: They serve their needy students brilliantly, but they receive some encouragement and funds from the affluent, so they are targeted in the name of “fairness.”

To larger issues:

In my column, I wrote that if gaining new funds for the archdiocese through the sale of real estate (in the form of shuttered churches) is a rationale for the closings, the archdiocese should instead consider selling the cardinal’s splendid 15,000-foot mansion on Madison Avenue. That would have the benefit of more closely aligning the church of New York with the modest style of Pope Francis in Rome.

Bishop O’Hara responds, in the Journal: “It is unclear how she envisions removing a portion of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and putting it up for sale, because the residence is not only a landmarked property, but it is also, literally, a part of the cathedral.”

Everyone knows the residence is landmarked because the archdiocese has for so many years spread that fact around as an excuse not to sell it. Is it a good excuse? Here is an explanation of landmarking law from New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. Here is an explanation of regulation from the National Register of Historic Places. From the register’s website: “There are no restrictions on the use, treatment, transfer, or disposition” of listed properties.

Landmarking protects buildings from being demolished or dramatically altered, usually externally, without permission. It also generally limits air rights, which the bishop does not mention in either of his replies. But buildings that are landmarked can be sold, or rented.

CNN some time back estimated the market value of the cardinal’s mansion at $30 million “as is”—for the building itself, in its current condition. That was a few months into New York’s high-end real estate boom, which continues to quicken.

As for the assertion that the mansion is part of the cathedral, or in it, or on top of or underneath it—my goodness. There is a picture of the mansion in the CNN piece above; readers can judge for themselves what the mansion is. It was not built as “part” of the cathedral but added on to it six years later. It operates as a structure connected to but in all practical ways independent of the cathedral. I add that I know the mansion fairly well, having met with and interviewed Cardinal John O’Connor there. He was a great man, a tender-hearted leader who admitted he wasn’t so good with the books but tried hard to keep every part of the greater church alive.

In short, the cardinal’s Madison Avenue mansion could probably be sold or rented if the archdiocese had a mind to do so.

I add here that the archdiocesan headquarters at 1011 First Avenue, where they make the decisions to close local churches, could also be shuttered to the archdiocese’s profit, and the headquarters moved to neighborhoods and boroughs that could use the boost.

The bishop’s interest in landmarking has an echo in the frantic attempts of some of the threatened parish churches to protect themselves by gaining landmark status. They do this in an attempt to keep themselves from being demolished. But the landmarking process takes time. It is widely suspected in the parishes that they were given only a few months to defend themselves against closure because the archdiocese knew the landmarking process takes years.

I raised in my column the myriad financial demands faced by the archdiocese, including the costs the past 20 or so years of fees and payments associated with the clergy sex scandals.

Bishop O’Hara, in the New York Post: “She resorts to the usual criticisms of the Church. While she mentions the cost of sexual abuse cases, she must know that such is not the case for the Archdiocese of New York, which has not had to pay large settlements. . . . The situation in New York is completely different than the one found in Boston, where a decade ago Cardinal [Sean] O’Malley did sell the estate that included the residence for the archbishop of Boston, motivated by a need to pay sex abuse settlements (which we have not had here in New York).”

As a loyal Catholic, I have been writing about the clergy sex-abuse scandals since the 1990s. Because of that, I have many times faced personal and professional abuse from… Read More »